Yet again Twitter is down for far longer than anticipated due to yet another server upgrade and I wonder about something. I can I recommend anyone use a service like twitter when it’s got such a poort uptime record. It’s not that complicated when you think of it as instant messaging so why all the downtime. I can’t help but feel there’s poor managment.
I miss saying Good Morning to my World Wide audience.
The latest version of Seesmic was rolled out this evening during the Demo Presentation by Loic Lemeur and amongst it’s newest features are replies counters so that you can see how many people reacted, a latest tweet display and faster loading times for the pages. There is an active conversations tab in the lower right corner and the shows tab has been replaced by a replies tab.
The site is far slicker and easier to use. Great changes.
Chillout® is an open source implementation of the DMP DRM software. The idea is to create a multiplatform toolkit that allows for the easy managment of rights for media files. Built with Java it has several levels of rights managment for a number of files. This includes encrytion software and more.
For a PDF document of what I saw today it’s available here.
As the rate of creation of content increases so does the challenge of following what was done by whom and that’s where digitalshadowcaster (TM). The idea is interesting to content producers.Â
Thus, the life cycle of an object may “Cast†a “Digital Shadow†(DS) that captures real time key information events and actions. A given DS allows for the ordered delivery of proprietary services managed over a predictable and transparent network of Object Based Representations in Object to Object (O2O) relationships derived form Actions and Events performed on the objects by agents with specified Roles.
In plain English they’re going to make it so that a central server keeps track of the changes you apply to media files are tracked and easier to deal with. It would track events, rights managment, object search, stats, billing and more.
The flow was described as Create, adapt, product, distribute. In other words this technology would be part of every step of the process and here’s an example of it’s implementation.
If you’re a content producer and you’re making a documentary your budget isn’t high therefore it would make sense that you want well established people to help you. As a result of a personality liking what you are up to they may give you access to some footage or music.
For this project it’s cheap but as your reputation grows so the managment of those rights and the relationship can change, both in billing and in terms of restrictions. It makes the use of media more flexible.
With more content appearing so the tracking issues become more complicated, hence the need for a new system of tracking to keep everything in order.
Two nights ago I got an invite from a friend at Kendra inviting me to come to the Friday session of this event. The event was held at Queen Mary University in London. The first session of the morning was to tell us more about the Digital Media project. The talk was given by Leonardo Chiariglione.
What I found interesting about this project and this movement is that it’s looking at the need for DRM as a good thing. It believes that there should be DRM but that media should be free to operate from one platform to another. At the moment we can have itunes, realplayer real and other devices and it’s confusing, even for those who live and breath the media.
They want to create a uniform standard that can be played from all platforms on all devices whilst at the same time protecting the rights both of the user and of the media active. He spoke about a standard of theirs which is now at version 3.1. Version 3 was agreed 3 months ago and the meeting was to update the current one. The document is over 600 pages long… I’m not going to read it.
At the same time iDRM was mentioned but that’s part of another post. Chillout® was also demonstrated.
Dacort on twitter has given me access to a site (I am not yet free to disclose the URL yet) where we can see our twitter activity in graphic form. It gives us a nice overview of how strong our twitter habit is.
(click image to see full graph)
When I started using twitter in May you can see I was very quiet and it progressed quietly over until August. In August I started to tweet. In December and January I am at the peak of my tweeting habit. This is due to the change in how twitter is used by many people. It went from being a status tool to being a conversation tool around the users activities.
As you can see from this graph my activity on twitter is constant throughout the week. With some people you see a clearly defined trough during the weekend. Not with me. You’ll know about me via twitter than any other means of communication as a result. It may not be intimate but there is a lot to be gleamed.
Some people believe that I never sleep, that I am constantly at the computer tweeting but that’s not quite the case. As you can see I tend to tweet constantly throughout the day from the moment I wake till the time I go to sleep. Apparently I sleep four hours a day 😉 I’m not quite that bad.
Here are some of the people I’ve atted most during my use of twitter. of course I’m sure this has evolved over the months and it is not representative of who I have talked to most. In some cases many instant messages and direct messages have been shared instead.
I have used four interfaces in particular, the web interface because that’s what everyone uses initially and with recent api troubles it has become the easier option. Twitterific I used for a long time but because of the volume of tweets I receive I had to find another alternative which was in the form of twhirl, an adobe air client that works far better. The final tool is instant messenger.
Instant messenger makes interacting with those you tweet with a lot far easier because you see their messages as soon as they arrive, rather than have to refresh constantly. Of course occasionaly you feel the need not to get all their updates so you rely on the web interface.
So as you see these are my usage states for twitter and it’s thanks to @dacort that I can show them to you. This is a peak as you will also be able to see your usage stats in the near future.
Happy tweeting.
Last night I went to watch an observational documentary called Kosovo, the Valley, about the conflict in Kosovo in 1998. The event took place at the Frontline club in London. The documentary starts with a graphic scene of the aftermath of an attack and takes a look at both the Albanian side of the conflict and the Serb. It’s a good documentary that helps to understand how the conflict was. Keep in mind that the documentary was shot back in 1998 and finished in 1999.
During the Questions and answers session we learned that the documentary was produced over a period of months, from months of research to weeks of actual production with film camera work and an amusing anecdote about the current Prime Minister of Kosovo having confiscated a few reels of films and more.
Thanks to the budget the producer had been given he had the ability and the luxury to learn and understand the story like someone who would file reports could not. As a result there are a few personal stories and it was not meant as a current affairs program.
Accessing the UCK (KLA) was apparently challenging because they had no media policy, rather there was some necessity in going via Switzerland although how Switzerland helped is unclear. Is it through the United Nations or other. I’m not sure.
Another aspect of this documentary is that through it’s very nature the film makers had the challenge of covering both sides of the story. The producer was faced with having to make sure not to disclose information from either side. That’s an interesting situation to be in but through negotiation they were able not to disclose any information about the others.
Following one person’s question we found out that due to the nature of these village communities they lived fairly isolated lives as a result of which they may never have met someone from the other side. As a result prejudice had been easy for some to bring in.
A side of effect of this was the lack of a media policy or organisation. One person in the crowd who had gone into the area in 1999 asked whether some questions about military organisation. Apparently they were not that well organised. The KLA had some people in charge of the main part although overall control was according to tribes and the head of the family, more traditional. What this meant is that they did not provide a unified front when attacks occured. Radios were not working. We could see aspects of this in the documentary.
I’m glad I went to see this documentary because after having a good friendship with one Albanian girl I saw a lot of their culture as it was in Switzerland. I became interested in the background as to why she moved to Switzerlan. I understood certain of the words and I know about the music. I’m happy I read “Les Tambours de la Pluie” since it meant I had better background information. I’d recommend watching the documentary although some scenes are quite graphic and may not be suitable for all. It’s powerful and I’m glad I went to it.
— Update —
There is a none english version that can be found here
I’ve seen a lot of people create link posts where there’s no comment just links and these are not effective. They’re not effective because they require the audience to click through and read the entire post to see what you thought was of interest.
Instead I’m going to choose key paragraphs and link to the article. If you like the paragraph then simply click on the link and you’ll get the full article within it’s context.
The user-generated video content tsunami has clearly changed the shape of the online environment we live in today. In fact, the growth of UG video so far is turning the Internet into a non-interactive medium. It’s created the quagmire we’re in today because the industry is treating all online video the same — meshing UG video with professionally produced brand videos. Even if consumers want to sit back and watch a monkey juggling video online, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to lean forward when they visit Web sites to get information about that car or house they’re thinking about buying.
 I believe it’s not about gazing into a crystal ball to predict what ad format will produce the greatest CPMs. In an industry as exciting, creative and fast-moving as ours, it seems we are all becoming as distracted as the consumers we are trying to attract. But we need to remember the basic premise that advertising is communication of valuable information. And for it to be effective, we need to communicate the message multiple times in multiple ways; we especially need to recognize that every time the message needs to be a fresh exciting experience that engages and resonates with target customers, motivating them to take action. David Ogilvy once said, “What really convinces consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.â€
Instead, go to work tomorrow worrying about something even more important. Rather than how many see your commercials, worry about how much time they spend with them.
Let me know whether you like this style of posting. Now to go on with traditional feedreading.
Due to the quantity of people using twitter it’s purpose has changed. From being a place where you tell people what you’re up to it’s become a place where you discuss what you’re up to and what you’re thinking about. As a result of this following people without them following you back is pointless.
I went through my twitter list this morning and it was at over 530 people being followed. I went through that list and started to remove people according to four factors. If they’re not following are they A) personalities, B) Amusing, C) active or d)responsive. If they met none of these criteria they were removed from my following list. Even those with attractive avatar pictures were removed.
That’s because twitter is a noisy place. People are tweeting about their activities 24 hours a day 7 days a week 366 days a year (since this year is a leap year) and if we start to listen and respond to those that can’t hear us then there’s a huge amount of noise generated.
It was a fast and easy process which too no more than half an hour to an hour and there is a big change. Now as I look through my timeline I find that I care about everyone in it. I know many of them well and there are quite a few I’ve met in person.
Yesterday for example it meant a lot to me when Jamie told me she was happy to have met me. It’s nice to be shown that you’re not just another piece of text on a screen. It’s nice to use twitter as a multiplatform instant messenger to chat both with old friends and to make new ones. That’s why so many people like twitter. That’s why I like it.
If you’re on twitter take the time to check who is following you and whether they react to your @ messages. If they don’t then it might be worth removing them from your follow list as they’re creating noise. Let’s keep the noise to a minimum and conversation to a maximum.
Twitter’s purpose has changed and I wanted to reflect it.
Two nights ago whilst having a conversation about technology with Fooz on twitter I got a message from Jamie about the Likemind coffee morning in Central London that she thought might be of interest to me. I decided that I would go and it was worth the effort. From what I gather it’s held once a month.
It’s a meeting that started around 0830 and continued till 1030 where a few people from various backgrounds in the media came to talk about a variety of topics. It ranged from Facebook and those that influence discussions to Qik, twitter and seesmic. Of course other topics were also discussed.
I talked to Mark of Wishful Thinking who wrote the e-book Time Management for Creative People. He has some interesting ideas and his blog can be found here. Whilst talking to him he touched on a number of interestin topics of which i would like to find out more. One was copyright and music for example, recommending a blog or two I should read and from the conversation I am interested in seeing what he’s been writing about.
If I’m not mistaken (and I did meet quite a few people) I also talked with Lauralynne about the challenges of finding work but also about twitter, a subject I know well. Arriving at almost 400 tweets she has a very different to the whole twitter thing. When talking to people many of them are not sure what it’s about yet and that’s why talking to her about it was good.
I talked to her about how society is changing. Previously when you met people you would meet them in person, be friends with them for a few weeks or months and one of the two would move to another country or another city and so the link would be lost, hence the utility for something like facebook. It then progressed onto a conversation about twitter. I explained my view that twitter is not just about saying what you’re doing. Another person who was listening in asked us to define twitter. I defined it as a multiplatform chatroom that you can take with you. I talked about the key difference between IM and twitter.
With instant messaging you chat with someone and you’re telling them about things as if you’re talking and you expect an answer. With twitter it’s about the day to day life. Through following your stream they’re going to come through a lot of noise depending on how often you tweet. That noise is what makes conversations easy when you meet twitter friends. You’ve got three topics ready because you know about the good and bad things currently going on in their life. It means you’re friends offline. Live in a city like London and you meet these people and a physical world friendship can occur.
The motivation behind this point was the notion that technologies are helping to seperate people and I wanted to refute that argument with the points made above. If you go through some of my previous posts you can follow the progression of these ideas further.
I heard Mark Iddon talk about his blog about multiplatform content and it sounds interesting although I have not yet had the opportunity to visit the site. Another person I came across was Damiano whose blog Nitmesh sounds interesting. It is described as : “A comment on the imploding chaos of the convergence that hopefully entertains, enlightens, educate, reminds and shares ideas that might stand out and make a remarkable difference”.
Overall the meeting was good, productive. I arrived feeling both inspired and shattered. Normal, I got to sleep at 4am and got up at 630 because I enjoyed the thought of being able to have more conversations in person rather than via twitter or seesmic.